Timing of the essence to create effective legislative elections

Medelina Hendytio, Budi Setiyono and Guy Janssen , Jakarta

When the General Elections Commission ordered a nationwide recount of the ballot, election monitoring groups rightly expressed their concern there would be no subdistrict-level representatives of the candidates available to witness the recount.

During the legislative elections such concerns were not raised by election observers. Interviews with election officials at subdistrict level, however, confirm election fraud could easily have occurred because in several subdistricts ballot counting was not witnessed by trained staff from all the political parties.

On April 5, four different legislative elections took place making it difficult for observers to supervise the elections. If national, provincial and district elections were organized on different dates, this supervision would have been better. The parties would also have had more time to create more detailed political platforms, informative campaigns and media coverage of the campaigns would have improved as a result. Splitting up these elections would mean political parties, candidates and voters would all profit.

During the last legislative election, research showed that district level politicians felt discouraged from developing an election platform. Parties were not motivated to invest in a political program for their district because they had to promote provincial and national platforms at the same time.

If the national elections were not organized on the same date as the district level elections, district candidates would no longer be hidden behind the national platform and would propose solutions to local problems in their campaigns. Voters measure the performance of their representatives against the promises made in election campaigns. So voters could better control their district governments if national, provincial and district elections took place on different dates.

Going one step further and organizing elections in every district on a different date would create even more democratic control and accountability.

Discrete dates for polls would allow parties to improve their campaigning methods from the current practices, which are not seen as effective. Only a few district politicians interviewed believe their parties' mass-media campaigns have had any effect on voters. The election results seem to confirm this.

District political candidates, therefore generally opt for closed-door campaigns to try and sway voters. A simple calculation proves that this method has its limits.

Observations indicate that indoor campaigns cost about Rp 50,000 for each participating voter. If one out of every two voters who attended decided to vote for the candidate they met, a candidate would have to dish out at least Rp 1.2 billion (US$130,000) just to reach the BPP election threshold (the minimum number of votes need for a candidate to get a seat in the local legislature).

Even the very wealthy would not be able to meet enough constituents. If candidates had the charisma to convince every person they met to vote for them, they would still have to organize 15 meetings of 40 voters every day of the campaign period to reach the BPP threshold. During the March campaign period, even the most active candidates did not manage to reach out to more than 10 percent of the BPP threshold.

New campaign methods are urgently needed. The best campaign methods are developed through trial and error. Currently party specialists have no time to try new methods because they are too busy with their party's nationwide campaigns at the national, provincial and district level.

Parties moreover have little incentive to study the effectiveness of their campaigns. When elections happen again in five years time everything may be different. If elections would happen in "district A" today and in "district B" some weeks later, parties in district B could profit from studying what messages and methods resulted in a larger number of votes.

So if elections were to take place on a different date in every district and every province, campaign methods could be studied more often and as a result campaigns would become more effective. Moreover, local media would have more time and space available to cover the elections in each district.

In fact local and national party leadership, voters, the administration, civil society and even business stand to gain from elections spread out over the current five-year term:

National-level political leadership would have more time to concentrate on local party development and the selection of candidates to ensure their party philosophy was properly translated into a local platform.

Voters would be exposed more frequently to elections and would become more sophisticated in their choices and expectations. Specifically organizations concentrating on election monitoring and voter education could develop highly qualified staff in a very short period of time.

Elections would be simple in small geographical areas. It would allow faster procedures for counting the votes, announcing the winners and swearing in new officials.

Finally, companies providing election support services would become more professional if elections were held on an ongoing basis. These companies could be printers, T-shirt producers or election advisors as well as polling companies and journalists. The services would also become cheaper. For example there would be more companies available to print the ballot papers at any one time, resulting in better prices. Some researchers argue that cost reduction due to more competition and better supervision, could offset the expected additional cost of spread-out elections.

At this moment the national parliament is discussing the revision of Law 22 including the direct election of regents and governors. All the above arguments are valid for executive as well as legislative elections. Since regents and governors are already elected on different dates in every district and province, not the dates for the executive but rather the legislative should change to improve accountability.

The regental elections should follow shortly after the legislative elections. Similar to the presidential elections, the right to field a candidate for the position of regent or governor will be conditional on a minimal representation in parliament. This would increase the chance for the development of a real opposition at regional levels, improving accountability even further.

The timing of elections is as important as the layout of the ballot paper. Organizing national, provincial and district level elections staggered on different dates would be most advantageous.

Medelina Hendytio is a political researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Budy Setiyono is a lecturer at the Department of Public Administration, Diponegoro University, Semarang. Guy Janssen is a Jakarta-based governance specialist.